Well over lunch, I discovered something funny. ChatGPT has access to Espeak inside its own sandbox environment, so it can run Espeak and generate IPA forms for what Espeak would output. Huge help. So, we fixed US English, next up is patching other languages. Both UK and US English now sound like they should in NV Speech player. Add-on link: eurpod.com/nvSpeechPlayer-2025…
(or original link works too, always latest there if you have a nice Browser like Firefox that doesn't cache downloads.)
Oh, and it also adds a dummy normalizer for empty IPA phonemes (that have no mapping right now.) We send a dummy 10-frames of audio in that case so speech shouldn't stall during say-alls.
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#Catima 2.41.5 is out!

Catima is a simple Android app to store event tickets/plane tickets/store discount codes and more in.

Version 2.41.5 is the last iteration of the barcode encoding feature. It removes automatic encoding in favour of deciding encoding once on adding a card (extracted from pkpass files, otherwise ISO-8859-1) and then sticking with that. It also fixes some other bugs.

github.com/CatimaLoyalty/Andro…

Coming soon to an app store near you!

#IzzyOnDroid #FDroid #GitHub #GooglePlay

I'M BEGGING - ICE will track you with your phone

THERE IS A WAY TO NULLIFY AND STOP IT. Please read.

No promotions, no affiliation, not sponsored. I just use this service myself - they have no idea who I am. Please, I'm saying this to protect people I'm not benefiting from this post.

ICE with Webloc is able to scan entire neighborhoods and obtain mobile phone service data. On of the most critical pieces of information they log is your IMSI. Its like your car's VIN number, it identifies that device uniquely, and is the identifier the cell tower sees when your phone connects to it.

Now your IMSI and its location is logged, and cataloged to track your location over time; where you work, hangout, live, etc.

YOU NEED TO ROTATE YOUR IMSI TO MAKE THE DATA USELESS, and rotate it often.

My cell service provider does this automatically every 24 hrs. I only know of 1 cell provider that does it = Cape.co. There are other privacy focused providers, but they focus on minimal data collection (Cape does that too) and other security practices first.

Cape:

  • Rotates your IMSI every 24 hours (or you can refresh it manually)
  • Prevents man-in-the-middle attacks and Stringrays with Enhanced Signal detection. If the cell tower your phone attempts to connect to does not match to a known CAPE middle core, it will not connect. It also alerts in the app when suspicious connections are attempted and automatically blocks them.
  • Collects 0 PII - not even your billing info. They known the phone number they are servicing and that's it - not your name, address, DOB, nothing. If they receive legal demand to hand over your data they cannot, as they don't know who you are and never logged it in the first place.

Normally I'd include a coupon here, but to show you I'm extremely serious, I'm not going to include it. If you really want $10 off for life you can find a coupon somewhere, and they have a promotion rn, but I will not directly benefit from this post.

FUCK ICE AND THE FASCIST HELLSCAPE.

that is all. Visit: Cape.co

Minnesota is really putting the facts of the 'opposition' party on show.

Walz says "I'm gonna deploy the National Guard," but actually deployed the state troopers to protect the Gestapo.

Now Frey's up on stage saying that MPD is just too busy protecting the economy to deal with crimes against humanity, so all protesters should go home. Because MPD won't protect them.

This is not opposition; it's collaboration and gaslighting.

Welcome calm329 as #curl commit author 1431: github.com/curl/curl/pull/2032…
#curl

It seems that py/cryptography's thoughts about OpenSSL (cryptography.io/en/latest/stat…) are doing the rounds at the moment.

I've not touched OpenSSL directly in a long time. In fact, it appears that the 10-year anniversary of that (imperialviolet.org/2015/10/17/…) passed by a few months ago!

So I've no direct comments on the piece but, a long time ago, I was in the position where I was landing changes in both OpenSSL and NSS (Mozilla's TLS library). OpenSSL was somewhat famous for having bad code. And, indeed, if you looked at it back then the functions were full of single-letter variable names with pointer arithmetic everywhere and context-free, somewhat scary comments. It wasn't outside the norm for 1990s C code, but I understand why people recoiled.

In contrast, if you looked at NSS code, it looked good! Consistent formatting (before clang-format), good naming, good comments.

But NSS had a PKCS#11 abstraction layer and, even after years, I never could understand how the control flow worked there. I would have to single-step in gdb every time to figure out where an operation grounded out into actual code. I was reminded of that when reading py/cryptography's descriptions of OpenSSL 3.0.

I had a pet theory at the time that, because OpenSSL was repulsive on the surface, it inhibited people enough that they couldn't add much deeper complexity. But NSS, with its invitingly clean-looking code, was understandable and then people had enough capacity left over to add deeper complexity.

There might be something to it, although you shouldn't discount the fact that entities who are willing to fund cryptography libraries often have demands that are contrary to clean code. Things like FIPS compliance and compatibility with a zoo of different accelerators and bespoke needs.

So rather it might have been that old OpenSSL was old OpenSSL because it was mostly unfunded. That meant that it looked pretty ragged, but also there weren't so many demands in tension with good design.

NSS was funded by interests that really cared about PKCS#11 compatibility so that you could use a super-expensive, certified-everything HSM with it. When OpenSSL got shocked into switching to a higher-funding model, that brought lots of those same sorts of competing interests, and then the incentives pointed towards adding slow, impenetrable layers of abstraction all over.

So @lwn is currently under the heaviest scraper attack seen yet. It is a DDOS attack involving tens of thousands of addresses, and that is affecting the responsiveness of the site, unfortunately.

There are many things I would like to do with my time. Defending LWN from AI shitheads is rather far from the top of that list. I *really* don't want to put obstacles between LWN and its readers, but it may come to that.

(Another grumpy day, sorry)

I use this all the time on the RNIB Talking Book site. It makes browsing tables of search results much easier and it's a service we use quite a lot. Quoting Freedom Scientific / Vispero: JAWS Feature Spotlight: Smart Navigation

Want a faster, more intuitive way to move through web pages, PDFs, and HTML content? Smart Navigation helps you browse more efficiently by letting you navigate by controls, tables, or both, so you can focus on the information that matters.

In this archived 20 Minute Tech Tips episode, you’ll learn what Smart Navigation is, why it matters, how to enable it, and how to switch modes on the fly.

Listen now: freedomscientifictraining.libs…
#JAWS #ScreenReader
image: JAWS Feature Spotlight, Smart Navigation. Dark blue shark fin with wavy line along the bottom of image. @freedomscientific

RE: climatejustice.social/@termina…

I’m now officially moving from “the cloud is just someone else’s computer“ to “the cloud is just a landlord for your data”

Very poignantly put @terminaltilt


Jeff Bezos is saying the quiet part out loud. They want to kill local computing.

You will own nothing and be happy. You will rent your computing power from the cloud. You pay a subscription for the privilege of using a computer.

AI demand is artificially spiking DRAM prices and Big Tech is pushing "AI PCs," the squeeze is on to force us into a rental model.

Reject this future. :NoAI:

Keep your hardware local.

Run #Linux. :tux:

Own your data.

The "cloud" is just a landlord for your data.

#NoAi #FOSS #OpenSource #Privacy #SelfHost #SelfHosting #BigTech #RightToRepair #RAM #Amazon #EatTheRich

windowscentral.com/artificial-…


This entry was edited (5 hours ago)

So now Techno DJs start remixing AI songs, as there was no other music? Ok tbf probably nothing new, but one of my favourite did, and it pisses me off because heck the quallity is bad. Like at least put effort into it rather than just taking the 1st result, slapping some base on it and calling it a day. I'm coming more and more to the opinion that AI music is just trash no matter what. I mean it's fascinating, like, the fact that's even possible. But I dislike it.
in reply to Jiří Eischmann

There also seems to be a large tick in Unknown, up to 16% from 11.2% in October (when Windows 10 went end of life.) I bet a lot of those are new Linux users too. One can hope, at least. gs.statcounter.com/os-market-s…